Elisabeth Banon

Dr. Banon is an Assistant Professor of psychiatry at McGill University and a psychoanalyst member of the Canadian Psychoanalytic Society and the International Psychoanalytic Society. She joined the staff at the Jewish General Hospital in July 1997 following a fellowship in psychotherapy research with a special interest in personality and mood disorders. She began in the Depression Research Clinic, of which she is the director. Three pilot studies have so far come out of the clinic. The third and current study is a randomized controlled trial of medium-term (18 months’ duration) psychotherapy, either CBT or dynamic, combined with medications for 30 subjects with recurrent unipolar depression. The control group is supportive clinical management, also with medications according to a standardized algorithm. A three-year follow-up period to measure remission, recovery, relapse, and recurrence is included in order to test the hypothesis that the active psychotherapies reduce underlying psychological risk for depression. Dr. Banon has published articles (six in total) on both the psychotherapy process and the outcome. Her article on the outcome of psychotherapy for personality disorders was published in the American Journal of Psychiatry. She currently has two manuscripts and one book in preparation. Dr. Banon supervises psychiatric residents in long-term psychodynamic psychotherapy and teaches the psychodynamics of depression. She also supervises residents and medical students for their core in-patient rotation and gives lectures on the psychopharmacology of major depression and gives lectures on general psychopathology to the second-year medical students at the university. She supervises family medicine and psychiatry residents in the psychiatric emergency room. She is an examiner for the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada and for the American Boards of Psychiatry and Neurology. Dr. Banon was the recipient of the Jewish General Hospital-McGill University Henry Kravitz Memorial best teacher award in 2002.